(no subject)

[bluegreen17]

hummingwolf recently posted this in her journal,and even though i'm not sure i agree with it or totally understand it,i like it enough to want to share it.

How surely gravity's law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of even the smallest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.
Each thing--
each stone, blossom, child--
is held in place.
Only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we each belong to
for some empty freedom.
If we surrendered
to earth's intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.
Instead we entangle ourselves.
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.
So, like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God's heart;
they have never left him.
This is what the things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our own heaviness
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.
-rainer maria rilke

Comments

[solarfields.livejournal.com]

I feel the same as you...unsure if I agree/understand but it is beautiful...

[arien.livejournal.com]

Rilke is my favorite poet. He's exploring a lot of big ideas in this one -- basically, he's saying that people get too wrapped up in their everyday lives. Everything revolves around trying to get money to buy things, to worry about what other people think, to do what's expected of us. Rilke says that in order to truly be happy and learn to explore ourselves, we have to let go of all of that. We have to let the natural world surround us, and we have to endure the scorn of people who would dislike our decisions. Children live the purest lives because they are not bound to things like adults are. Rilke always wanted to live as an artist, and while he was extremely poor (so poor he could not afford copies of his own books), he was also able to write as much poetry as he wanted to, and was very happy doing that. He didn't have the things normally associated with success like money or a nice house, but he had success all the same.

Hope this helped a bit. There's a lot more in there, but I don't think you'd want a seven-page paper on it. ;)